Measurement

One reason that content marketing is so powerful is its ability to provide proof of success. We’re sure you’ve heard stats like “Companies that blog 1-2x month generate 70% more leads than companies who don’t” from the likes of Hubspot and other sources. Proof is in the pudding, and the pudding in this case is measurement. Measurement that is specifically tailored to your unique business and goals.

With online marketing, your success is shown through measurement and reporting. As you develop your online marketing measurement and reporting strategies and methodologies, you’ll be able to steer your strategy in a direction that is most successful. In almost every situation, true results boil down to more leads and increased revenue. Because online marketing is iterative, with thorough measurement of performance, analyzing those results, and reporting, you gain insight that either confirms your strategy, or gives you insights on where to improve. Here’s the general ‘scientific methodology’ of Internet marketing measurement:

Determine Metrics Based on Business Goals

Establish Baseline & Benchmarks

Track Results against Baseline and Benchmarks

Analyze Data for Counterintuitive or Confirming Results

Confirm New Hypotheses with Testing

In this context, failure of a particular online marketing strategy is something from which you can learn from and use to take a big leap forward. Your competitive advantage develops from these insights. Although, it only happens if you hold your content accountable and establishing goals for it in the form of benchmarks. We’ll work with you to break your measurement benchmarks into answerable questions, like:

Did blog posts drive traffic that converted without downloading a free guide?

Did the email or social media create conversions?

What are top performing content types in terms of traffic, social shares, and conversions?

What is your top referring external site ad how can you take advantage of this promotional outlet?

And so on…You can only know your progress if you first measure your current performance as a baseline.

Knowing which industry standards in your measurement and reporting are pertinent to your online marketing efforts is another area where we can provide expertise. If you have a long B2B sales cycle, you don’t want to compare your performance to consumer packaged goods benchmarks. Moreover, we want to help you understand through deeper analysis what those metrics mean when related to each other. Taken together over time, we can help you see what behavior you’re driving and develop tests that will confirm the analysis or provide the insight to drive stronger alignment with your audience’s needs.